Hiller - The Myth of Primitivism. Perspectives on Art - Esoteric Online

<strong>The</strong> myth <strong>of</strong> primitivism 102
murals in which he set out to reinvent the history <strong>of</strong> Mexico (and its modern
development) in visual images for a still-overwhelmingly non-literate population.
In Paris Rivera may well have absorbed the avant-garde discovery <strong>of</strong> ‘primitive’ and
non-European art: some <strong>of</strong> the evocations <strong>of</strong> Mexico in his early murals appear to owe
something to the paradisal tropics <strong>of</strong> Gauguin and Rousseau. But in Mexico such
‘primitivism’ became absorbed in the powerful and complex movement <strong>of</strong> indigenism or
nativism which was a driving force <strong>of</strong> the revolution in the area <strong>of</strong> culture and which
spread across all disciplines (art, architecture, archaeology, folklore, music, poetry,
education, literature, medicine, and so on). Anthropologists define nativism as an
organized and conscious effort on the part <strong>of</strong> members <strong>of</strong> a society to revive parts <strong>of</strong> its
own culture—in Mexico this implied not only national resurgence but also the
rediscovery <strong>of</strong> indigenous cultural values despised by most <strong>of</strong> the ruling class within
Mexico itself.
Characteristically, Rivera’s style evolved from primitivist projections to an
extraordinary effort <strong>of</strong> factual research into ancient and folkloric Mexico, which he
converted into painted images. In a late mural like the one in the Hospital de la Raza in
Mexico City, Rivera gave a vast and detailed portrayal <strong>of</strong> Aztec medical practices equal
space with a portrayal <strong>of</strong> modern medicine. This in itself was a bold assertion, but when
one looks longer at the layout <strong>of</strong> this painting one sees complex tensions <strong>of</strong> fact, fantasy,
and desire. <strong>The</strong> Aztec scenes are painful but open and communal; the modern ones
painless but torn by class strife and segmented into alienating boxes. <strong>The</strong> very colour and
conviviality <strong>of</strong> the Aztec scenes show the way in which Rivera has marshalled and
constructed an ancient world to point beyond the present to a Utopian communist future.
Rivera’s gargantuan project and his position in twentieth-century art raise many
questions. Interestingly, some <strong>of</strong> the contradictions <strong>of</strong> his art become clearest in the
comparison between his own painting and that <strong>of</strong> his wife Frida Kahlo, certainly his
equal as an artist. In keeping with his socio-political role as educator and illustrator, his
relationship to the masses always seems to be one <strong>of</strong> depicting and organizing from the
outside, He stylized both ancient and modern Mexicans as a people, as a historical force.
Rivera’s contemporary, the Peruvian critic José Carlos Mariátegui, had said that the
‘idealization and stylization <strong>of</strong> the Indian’ was an inevitable feature <strong>of</strong> ‘indigenist’
literature in Latin America. An ‘indigenous’ literature would appear only ‘when the
Indians themselves are able to produce it’. 21
It is revealing too that women could enter Rivera’s murals only allegorically. Even
though very <strong>of</strong>ten they were his friends or lovers, in the mural they took on a generalized,
abstracted persona, an actor either in historical events or in the world <strong>of</strong> concepts:
‘fertility’, ‘America’, ‘agitation’, etc. Frida Kahlo’s method—although she lived with
Rivera for so many years and was as militantly communist as he—was almost opposite.
She had no links with the tradition <strong>of</strong> ‘high art’ and architecture. She was self-taught and
because <strong>of</strong> ill-health was almost forced to work on a domestic scale, and even from her
bed. Where Rivera generalized, Kahlo particularized, thinking on the level <strong>of</strong> the
individual and lived experience. When Kahlo came to represent the Indian, it was the
Indian in herself. My Nurse and I (1937) conveys the idea <strong>of</strong> being nurtured by the
indigenous culture <strong>of</strong> Mexico in as intimately close, as physical, a metaphor as one can
imagine (Kahlo herself was <strong>of</strong> mixed ancestry: German on her father’s side, Spanish and
Indian on her mother’s). By showing herself as an adult she implies the continuation <strong>of</strong>